including a tech roadmap session given by Shaun Sullivan Blackbaud's
CTO. Below is my summary of the most important things said about version 8
and the infinity platform.
First, version 8 is often referred to as infinity but it is easy to get
confused with the naming. Infinity is really an underlying platform upon
which the various version 8 applications are built. The infinity platform
itself is in use as we speak running some current Blackbaud products.
In version 8 the client is history. Version 8 apps will be browser-based and
BB maintains it will run in any modern browser needing only HTML5 and
javascript. No SilverPoint, Flash, ActiveX, etc. The RE8 pages he showed
looked good and the speed was impressive; looks like they are not allowing
the Faculty Access/NetClassroom programmers anywhere near version 8! If the
live system works anything like what I saw, then I'll be happy. Dumping the
client is of course great news for any Mac schools that have Windows clients
merely to be able to run Blackbaud. This is a relatively recent change (less
than a year). Recall that the previous roadmap was to keep the client but
build a web services layer between the client and the database.
Blackbaud's mobile strategy is to create HTML5 compliant pages rather than
build custom mobile apps for each mobile platform. No surprises here. I
think Google is ultimately going to do the same thing with Google Apps and,
for example, will eventually get rid of the GMail mobile platform specific
apps. Unless custom mobile apps are absolutely essential (e.g. because they
have to access hardware in an advanced way) it just makes much more sense to
focus development time building one browser based web app rather then
spending time maintaining custom mobile apps for iPhone, Android,
Blackberry, Symbian, etc. Some interesting customizations I saw is the
ability to create mobile web pages based on queries. For example, if you
create a student query showing selected fields you could then deploy the
results of the query as a mobile page.
Now for the thing that I found most surprising. While Blackbaud is open to
changing depending on client requests (uproar?), they currently plan to
require RE8 (and FE8/EE8 when released) to be hosted in the cloud. As of
today, there is no plan to provide an option to install version 8 on servers
in our server rooms. This will have profound implications for those of us
who have built outside the box solutions by reading data directly from SQL
Server as no direct database access will be possible. Anything we have built
will have to either be recreated inside of the applications using the
significantly enhanced customization options rewritten to pull data from a
cloud based web service rather than from a locally hosted database. If
Blackbaud does this right and properly documents their programming tools (a
big "if") then this means a lot of work but ultimately it means the ability
to build much more robust custom applications that can actually do things
rather than our current custom apps that are pretty much limited to
displaying data stored in BB.
When I asked how far FE8/EE8 was behind RE8 he said FE8/EE8 would follow the
release of RE8 much closer than they have historically. The reason, and this
is the most positive thing I've heard in this conference, is that
Blackbaud's model of building FE/EE based on RE and then forking the
products is no longer their model. FE/EE are being developed at the same
time (although of course RE continues to lead the way) on the infinity
platform they will remain on the same infinity platform rather than forking.
The long term implication of this should be that FE/EE should not lag so far
behind RE in the future. At this point you may have guessed that this
convergence means there will no longer be two databases, just one holding
data for all Blackbaud products. However, given that we will no longer have
direct access to the database and won't have local SQL Servers this is
really a moot point. Also not surprisingly, for schools using the whole
suite, Sullivan recommends not upgrading RE8 immediately after it is
released. Instead, he recommends waiting until all version 8 products
(RE/FE/EE) are released and upgrading at the same time or as closely
together as we have resources to accomplish. Given the major changes this
makes sense, but the prospect of upgrading nearly simultaneously is
daunting. Do I hear any volunteers to go first? ;)
Overall, I'm encouraged by what I have heard, but find it troubling that
Blackbaud is still not ready to commit to a release date for RE8. However,
the new platform looks too mature for Blackbaud to make any more major
changes (e.g. like their abandoning of the client about a year ago) so I am
hopeful that we will hear something firm about a release date reasonably
soon. My prediction is that RE8 will be available in about a year with FE/EE
following 12-18 mo later and ultimately that we'll be migrating RE/FE/EE in
the summer of 2013 or 2014.
Of course, no matter how good the new platform turns out to be, when it
comes to running our schools everything depends on how well they use the
platform to build tools we need that work the way we need them to work, and
how much flexibility we have to customize the product to match the unique
ways each of our individual schools do things. To do this they need to
listen to their education customers and Blackbaud's record in this respect
is mixed at best.
Tom Phelan
Peddie School
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